[COLD OPEN] I've always just been fascinated by this role of this goat in Jewish literature. There's just something about this image of this goat who's taken all this blame and is carrying all this burden, but really has sort of accepted that, and whose strength is in his endurance. I always felt this kind of kinship with this goat, because I sort of felt like, oh, this goat puts up with so much, but has all this integrity and dignity. And so that was how I created this character of One Little Goat in the book.
[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. Dara Horn is the author of five Jewish novels for adults, the provocatively titled non fiction essay collection People Love Dead Jews, and now a graphic novel for kids, One Little Goat: A Passover Catastrophe. She writes brilliant, insightful articles for The Atlantic and other publications, which set my brain on fire when I read them. I recommend you run out and read everything she's ever written. But before you do, listen to this interview and check the show notes for links to Dara's work by subscribing to my newsletter at BookOfLifePodcast.substack.com. [END MUSIC]
Dara Horn, welcome to The Book of Life. I have to say I'm kind of starstruck right now!
Well, I'm starstruck to be here. You were doing podcasts before they were cool, so you're way ahead of the rest of the world.
That's actually true. This is the podcast's 20th anniversary this year.
Older than most of your kidlit readers, hopefully.
Right! So you have written so many excellent books. We're here right now to talk about your first children's book and first graphic novel, One Little Goat: A Passover Catastrophe. So just briefly, tell us what it's about and what inspired you to move in this new direction.
Sure. So, One Little Goat: A Passover Catastrophe: it's about a seder that goes horribly wrong. A family with four children who, of course, are like wise, wicked, simple, and can't ask, like the four children we talk about at the Passover seder. And the family cleans the house before Passover, but you know, there's a good 24 hours between cleaning the house and the seder beginning, and during that time, these four children trash the house. As a result, no one can find the afikoman. Since the seder cannot end without the afikoman, they're then trapped at the seder for six months. Their, like, hair is growing long and the food is regenerating on the table, and they're driving everyone insane. About six months in, there's a knock on the door, like, Yay, maybe it's Elijah the prophet who comes to end the seder. But of course, it can't be Elijah the prophet, because we're not up to that part of the seder yet. So the oldest child, the wise child, goes to answer the door, and it's a talking goat. The goat says, "I'm the scapegoat. I'm the one everyone blames for their problems. I can help you find your afikoman." The kid says, "Great, where is it?" And the goat says, "No, no, no, no, no, not 'where?' 'When?'" The goat explains that over the past six months, while this family has been trapped at this never ending seder, thousands of years of previous seders have accumulated underneath this seder. It's like an archeological tel, like those mounds where there's layers of civilizations, one on top of the other, and this kid has to travel through those seders in order to find the afikoman. So it ends up becoming this journey through Jewish history.
Passover is an extremely important holiday to me. Since I'm a child, I've been a storyteller. You know, this is one of the main storytelling holidays that we have; Purim, maybe Hanukkah, but this is a holiday that's all about the telling of the story, and the reenactment of the story is part of the story. In my life as an academic Jewish nerd, I read Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, the historian's book Zakhor, which means to remember. It's about the role of Jewish memory in Jewish history. And he has this assertion that Jewish tradition doesn't really engage in history, it engages in memory. He says, the past is not a series of events to be contemplated at a distance. It's a series of situations into which one is existentially drawn. And I think that Passover really illustrates this. We're told that in every generation, we're supposed to see ourselves as if we personally came out of Egypt, and everything about the Passover seder is trying to draw you into that experience. It's our sensory aspects of it with the foods that we eat. And the children are supposed to be asking questions that reflect their participation in the story. You know, the wicked child who says, what does all this mean to YOU? It says that if that child had been present and Egypt, he would not have been redeemed.
To me, this was just fascinating, and when I was a child, I felt this. When I was growing up, there was one seder, this gigantic multi generational seder. It was like 40 or 50 people seated at this extremely long table by age. The old people at the table were all Holocaust survivors, mostly speaking in Yiddish and singing songs in Yiddish and telling stories about their experiences. Most of them had been fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which happened on Passover of 1943. And then down at my end of the table with the kids, it was like a different seder. We were, you know, talking about The Simpsons or whatever. And I just remember sort of finding this very frustrating, because I was like, there's a whole other seder going on at the other end of the table which seems kind of interesting, and I'm not part of it! But also imagining the seder we were in, and then the seder they were in in the Warsaw Ghetto underneath our seder, and then their grandparents' seders, and then their great grandparents' seders. And sort of thinking of this room I'm sitting in is like this lighted box on this tower of lighted boxes of all these rooms going back thousands of years.
You know, children always are looking for some way of entering into a world larger than their own. As a child, you have so little control over your life. Books, as you know, of course, are a major way that children enter other worlds. But I think that this Jewish tradition of the seder and the participation of the children also has the potential to be this portal to this world that's much, much larger than theirs, and it's right underneath their feet, if only there was a way to open that door.
Wow. You were a very philosophical child, which really makes sense, seeing, you know, the kind of work you've been doing as an adult.
I don't know about that. Mostly at this second seder, I was very bored and felt like it was not participatory enough, because at my parents seder we'd always be doing these parodies: How Forrest Gump Escaped from Egypt, Mesopotamian Idol about Abraham smashing the idols. You know, I'm now the host of the seder and ours, we take to a much, much further extreme, which I'm happy to talk about. But I've been babbling for a while.
I'm writing that down to ask you about later, to go into that some more. So my review copy, it's an advanced reader's copy of One Little Goat, and it has an introductory note to book sellers, and it describes Passover as a commemoration of a commemoration. And you sort of maybe touched on this. But can you talk about what you mean by that?
Yes, so the seder is a commemoration of a commemoration, because there are moments in the seder where you're talking about other seders in the Haggadah itself. One of the first passages that you read is about this seder that happened in B'nai Brak in Israel, with these five Sages of the Talmud, right? Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Tarfon, et cetera, et cetera. And it talks about how they stayed up all night discussing the Exodus till someone came in and told them it was time to say the morning prayers. I remember always getting to that part of the seder and being like, why are we talking about this random seder? Now as an adult, I completely appreciate it, because these were people who were involved in the second Jewish revolt against Rome. Some commentaries suggest that when they were staying up all night discussing the Exodus that what they're really talking about is plotting this revolt. It's sort of similar to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising seder. These people who are inspired by this story of their ancestors' freedom to fight for their own freedom. So there's this reenactment, layered on a reenactment, layered on a reenactment.
And ultimately, what's interesting to me too is that the first seder actually happens the night before the Exodus from Egypt. It's called in Hebrew leil shimurim, the night of watching, or the night of vigil, where they're waiting for the Angel of Death to pass over their homes, when all the Egyptians' firstborns are going to be struck down, and then it's the next day that they're liberated from Egypt. But that's the night where it says, you know, you're supposed to eat this matzah and this Passover lamb that you're supposed to sacrifice, and these bitter herbs. That's the first seder. It's sort of this time travel experience just being a participant in the seder, and it's made me think about how people in the future will look at our seders.
When the goat starts explaining the layers of seders, it sounds like a big ball of timey wimey, wibbly, wobbly stuff. So were you influenced at all by Doctor Who?
Not so much influenced by Doctor Who. There's a novel that was very influential to me as a writer, as an adult novelist, that came out when I was a teenager. It's a book by the Hebrew novelist Alef Bet Yehoshua. This book came out 30 years ago. It's called Mr. Mani. It's a novel about five generations of a Sephardi family in Jerusalem with a suicidal gene. What's interesting about it to me as a novelist, and the reason this book has stayed with me for so many years, is that it moves backwards in time. So the very first chapter of the book takes place in what was then contemporary Jerusalem. So it's like in 1989 or something like that. That's where you meet the contemporary Mr. Mani. And then the next chapter takes place in the 1940s and you meet his father. And it goes back to like, you know, the 1840s. I just remember reading that, and just having my mind blown by this, and thinking like, this is sort of literature as archeology, peeling back layers. And another book I read as a teenager was a book by James Michener called The Source that was about these layers of an archeological tel, it's like a mound of these civilizations. And so, so the thing about Doctor Who is that there's no real order to it, right? You know, any episode can be about any random period in time or any planet. But I do have a soft spot for all those kinds of time travel stories.
Tell us about the concept of scapegoats. How significant is it to Passover and how is it significant to Jewish history?
The scapegoat story is actually from a different holiday: it's about Yom Kippur. In the Torah we read this long litany of animal sacrifices that happened in the ancient temple in Jerusalem and also in the portable temple in the desert before they come to the promised land. The high priest, the Kohen Gadol, puts all of the sins of the people onto the head of this goat. And then this goat is, in fact, not sacrificed in the temple, but is actually released in the wilderness. Later, it turns out they do actually kill this goat by throwing them off a cliff in the wilderness. Anyway, bad news for the goat. But you know, this is where we get the English expression scapegoat, the one who all the problems of the society are placed on this blameless creature. There is a Passover sacrifice. You know, the Torah is all about these animal sacrifices. That's a huge focus of ancient Judaism, obviously irrelevant today, but you either sacrifice a lamb or a goat on Passover. That was the major ritual that was the center of Passover in ancient times, in the time of the temple.
The place where the goat shows up in Passover seder today is actually a more recent addition to the Passover ritual, which is this song, Chad Gadya, One Little Goat, which comes at the end of the Passover seder. In English, [SINGING] "One little goat. One little goat. My father bought for two zuzim," and then there comes the cat that eats the goat, and then there's a dog that bites the cat, and then there's a stick that beats a dog, and it goes on like this, almost like a drinking song at the end of four cups of wine, at the end of the Seder. You know, it probably is just a drinking song, to be totally honest. I mean, that's probably the origin. But the most likely apocryphal explanation for why this song is there, is that this is actually a symbolic song about the Jewish people, where the Jewish people are, in effect, this scapegoat, this one little goat. When it says, My father bought this goat for two zuzim: zuzim are coins, the goat is the Jewish people, my father is God, and God has redeemed the Jewish people. The two coins are the two tablets of the Ten Commandments. Then all of these animals and creatures and sticks, fire, water, all these things, the ox, the butcher... they represent different empires that conquered the land and the people of Israel up until the point when the song is written. So it's like, you know, and I'm gonna get this wrong, but it's like, you know, I think the cat is the Babylonians, and then the dog that bites the cat is the Persian Empire. There's the Babylonians and the Persians and the Greeks and the Romans and the Byzantines and the Islamic empires and the angel of death, actually, I think is supposed to be the Crusaders, because that's around the Middle Ages when this song was written, and there was these Crusader massacres of Jews. And then it says at the end that God will kill the angel of death. So that animates this story of the goat. And so I've always just been fascinated by this role of this goat in Jewish literature, this figure of this goat comes up all the time in Yiddish literature, there's, like, all kinds of stories about shenanigans involving goats. There's also a story by the Hebrew Nobel laureate Shai Agnon, it was actually one of the first stories I ever read in Hebrew, called Ma'aseh Ha'ez, it's The Fable of the Goat, and it's about this goat that appears in this shtetl in Poland and then travels through these tunnels from this shtetl in Poland to Tsfat, to Safed in the land of Israel. Horrible things happen when this child goes and follows the goat and then tries to bring his father back to the Promised Land with him. And there's actually a beautiful children's book about this in English now, it's called From Foe to Friend. It's a graphic novel that includes that story. But there's just something about this image of this goat who's taken all this blame and is carrying all this burden, but really has sort of accepted that, and whose strength is in his endurance. I've experienced this as a reader and seeing this figure of this goat that just keeps showing up over and over again in different aspects of Jewish literature, whether it's in religious literature, whether it's in songs and folk tales. I always felt this kind of kinship with this goat, because I sort of felt like, oh, this goat, it puts up with so much, but has all this integrity and dignity. And so that was how I created this character of One Little Goat in the book.
I love that! So the main character who travels with the goat, has adventures with the goat, is the wise child at the seder. What does being wise mean to you? How do you define it? And were you the wise child at your family seder?
Well, I'm the second of four children. So technically, in that order, I'm the wicked child.
[LAUGHING] Do they have to go in order?
They don't have to go in order at all! And the reality, of course, is that each of us has all of these children within us. I mean, I was certainly in this like, know it all role as a child, for sure, as you could probably tell even by talking to me as an adult, sadly. But in the book, the wise child is in this role of being the oldest sibling, and has basically made a foundational mistake where he thinks that what makes him wise is that he does what people tell him to do, that he's the one who takes responsibility with the siblings; he's obedient. And the goat challenges him and says, "What makes you think you're really wise? Like, you don't really seem to ask any questions." This is sort of the beginning of the transformation of the main character, where he suddenly looks at himself and says, like, "Wait a minute. Am I really as smart as I think I am?" which I think is a moment that a lot of children in this middle grade age category go through, and it's always very uncomfortable, whether you've been cast as the smart kid, as the wicked kid, whatever it is, there's a moment, I think, as you're growing up where you question that role, and you step back and you're sort of like, 'Do I still want to be what everybody around me has assigned me to be?"
T he goat points out the value of these supposedly negative children, the evil child, the simple child, the child who does not know how to ask. So talk about how the goat reframes those kids in a more positive light.
Yes. Well, I think that this is something that a lot of us, who are parents, have understood: if you can name your child's greatest flaw, you've also just named your child's greatest strength. The goat starts challenging the wise child. For example, they talk about his sister, the so called wicked child. The goat says to him, "If it weren't for her, you wouldn't even know that rules could be broken. Who's more likely to notice when some routine that used to work isn't working anymore?" She's the person who's actually more likely to be creative and innovative. The simple child, the younger brother, is sort of like, you know, "Where have you been? I miss you. I love you." And he says, "Who's a nicer person, him or you? Who's a kinder person?" He has this broadening experience of seeing past his own nose. Part of growing up at this age is having empathy for people who aren't you.
Let's talk about the art.
I was on a family road trip, and we stopped for lunch. Right next to the place where we had lunch, there was a comic book shop, and my kids are all fascinated by comics, went in this comic book shop. One of the books that they bought was called Capacity by this cartoonist, Theo Ellsworth. He's a tremendously talented indie cartoonist. They were fighting over this book. On the flight home, I was like, you know, what are you guys all fighting about? And I stole it from whoever had just finished it. And I was just entranced by his artwork, the way he turned abstract ideas into these amazingly edgy and subversive images, and just the way he was translating thought into image in this amazingly playful way. It was absolutely enchanting. I finished reading it, and then I got home and I cold emailed him. He's not Jewish... I kind of guessed that by the fact that his name was Theo Ellsworth, and he lives in Montana. And I was like, Hi. Love your work. I have this idea for a book. It's a little bit complicated. Deep breath. Didn't even expect a response, and he responded, he was like, This sounds amazing. I would love to give this a try. It was just an absolute magical experience working with him.
Wow. I mean, that's also a very unusual way to go about creating a book for the author to cold call the illustrator, without working with a publisher first!
That is true. It was a bit weird. At first, I was paying him out of my own pocket to do some samples, and then I realized, well, I'm gonna need probably about two full chapters in order to sell this to a publisher. I was able to get some small grants from a few different organizations in order to support that work. Because you're absolutely correct, yeah, this was extremely unconventional, but it was an amazing experience working with him.
The art in this book has this sort of flattened quality that makes it kind of busy, but it also seems appropriate to the theme of flattened time. What do you think of these illustrations? Are they different from how you imagined they would be?
Completely different from what I imagined it would be, and much better. I imagined all these past seders as like a column, maybe some kind of cutaway. It was his idea to create this tunnel of doors, and each of the doors are labeled with the date and the place of the seder behind them. But what he also did was he injected this sort of layer of surrealism into it that didn't come from me. It's only a visual element, like when this child opens the doors to these seders, every time the proportions are different. So there's some doors where he opens it and it's like an Alice in Wonderland thing where only his head fits into the door. Sometimes it turns out to be a hatch through a ceiling. Sometimes it turns out to be a bunker that's coming up out of the floor. Sometimes, when he enters these rooms, he's huge, sometimes he's tiny. Sometimes he's so small that he's standing on a table or on someone's shoulder. The goat also is changing sizes all the time. He came up with this idea of these clouds, that sometimes you're able to travel through these clouds. There's always like, these visual elements that he that, yeah, totally came from him, did not come from me.
You're right that the art is very flattened and very busy. That was part of what I found fascinating about it. Because as a child, I used to love those books by David Macaulay or whatever, like The Way Things Work, or like Richard Scarry, you look at a page and you're just like, whoa, okay, I'm gonna need to take some time to absorb everything that's happening. For adults. I think that could be kind of overwhelming when you open this and you're like, What is going on on this page? But kids respond to it really differently. I found it has kind of brought me back to being a child, and the things that were fascinating to me about illustrated books that I remember enjoying as a child.
Oh, that's wonderful. Do you have a favorite illustration?
I think my favorite is probably the moment when the goat first arrives at the house, because until that moment, you're in a very real world. A surreal thing has happened in the story where this seder is going on for six months and can't end, but the drawings at that point are still in the realistic world. But then there's a knock on the door. He actually illustrates the knocks as like little bursts of light on the page. And when the wise child opens the door and he sees this goat, but on the next page, you see it from the other side, and you see that his house is suspended over this void, and this goat is actually floating on a cloud that's approached his front door. That moment where suddenly you'll turn the page and you're in a totally different world, would probably be my favorite moment in the book. There's a lot of other ones that I love. There's this angel of death that comes at you at different moments, but there's only certain moments when the child notices it. The Passover story is actually really scary. Today's generations of parents are very reluctant to expose their children to anything frightening, and this is an incredibly frightening story that we're commanded to expose our children to. And there's this ominous... There's an omininous... ominousness to it. There's an omininous... I'm going to say that more clearly. [HEIDI LAUGHS] There is an ominous quality to the Passover story that I think is very fascinating and haunting to children, especially because it's one of the few times when they're allowed into that kind of adult space. It's an intergenerational experience where we're all at this table wondering what's going to happen next.
The goat says that it's human nature to revisit old stories. Why do you think that is?
You know, this is a basis of Jewish life, is this idea that you keep reading a story over and over again. When I was a child, it used to drive me crazy, growing up in a family that was going to synagogue services, reading the Torah portions that happen every week. And I remember being in the synagogue being like, why are we reading this book again? I already read it! Right? Like, I already know what's gonna happen. [LAUGHING] Like, there's no suspense, like they're gonna get out of Egypt. And it's actually only as an adult that I appreciate that we're reading these stories over and over again, because the story doesn't change, but you do. And these stories mean something different every year of your life that you read them, depending on what's happening in your life and in your world. And the whole idea of teaching the story to your children completely changed its significance to me when I became a parent. There are different parts of the story that resonate at different times. You know, there's a passage in the Haggadah that says, in every generation, people rise up against the Jewish people, and that God will always rescue us from their hands. And that always felt like an old kind of thing that applied to the people on the far end of the table who had survived the Warsaw Ghetto. And I mean, obviously since October 7, this has taken on a different meaning. I think that it's human nature to revisit these stories, because the stories don't change, but we do.
Good answer! This is your first kid's book. Does it relate in any way to your writing for adults?
Yes. All of my writing for adults is essentially about time. How do we find meaning as mortals in a world that will outlast us? To me, that's sort of the problem that I'm trying to solve as a writer, and that's rather ambitious, and I'm not gonna solve it. But the whole idea of how you live your life in a finite strip of time, in whatever time you happen to have been born into; this question of how you have access to all of the generations of people who came before you, who you're literally made out of, biologically, true, but it's also emotionally true that so much of who we are is shaped by the people who raised us, the people who taught us. Right? The people we surround ourselves with. And if you just think about an older person who influenced your life, a person who gave you what mattered to you, whether it was my English teacher who got me excited about reading or whatever it was, and you then think about, Well, where did that person get that excitement? There was someone in their life who gave it to them. And so, you know, while we have a genetic and biological inheritance, we also have this inheritance, more of like an emotional or intellectual or spiritual inheritance, from all the people who came before us, and we live with that world, and then we're creating that world for people who come after us.
That's my subject as a writer. My previous books all deal with different aspects of contemporary Jewish life and also history and how history is related to the current moment. And I've done that certainly in my non fiction. I have a book called People Love Dead Jews, that certainly is about how the past impacts the present, but I've done it in all of my novels as well. I have a novel called Eternal Life that's about a Jewish woman who's been alive for 2000 years. I have another book that's about a Jewish software developer who creates this app that records absolutely everything you do, and then the story kind of ends up going back in time to the creation of the Cairo geniza, which is this like medieval archive that was then rediscovered a hundred years ago and is still being processed by scholars to this day; and it's sort of about this question of what memories of ours are worth saving. All my novels deal with this in one way or another, and One Little Goat is actually, just, I was able to sort of have the most fun with this idea, the past that's always beneath our feet.
In an interview on the Talking Points podcast, you said that when you began writing novels, you set a goal of turning English into a Jewish language. Can you tell us more about what that means?
Sure. I have a doctorate in Hebrew and Yiddish literature. That's my academic background. I've taught those topics many times. And when I first started studying Jewish literature in Hebrew and in Yiddish, I was really jealous of the writers whose works I was reading. Not jealous of their lives, a lot of which were really horrible, but I was jealous of their language. Because when I was growing up as an American Jew, I often felt like there was sort of a thinness or a lack of authenticity to American Jewish life. You know, looking back on that, I think I was wrong. But at the time, I noticed that when reading Jewish literature in English, because that was the only language I could read growing up, what was available in English was like Philip Roth. There's pluses and minuses to Philip Roth's work, but he was not engaging with the content of Jewish civilization in his work. That's just not what he was writing about. He was writing about Judaism as a social identity in a post World War II society. You know, basically what being Jewish meant was being alienated or something like that, or being a second generation immigrant, whatever it was, there was no substance to his engagement with Jewish tradition. And when I started reading these people who were writing in Jewish languages, I just discovered there was this constant pull of Jewish traditional texts. And what I realized is, like, every language has an archeology of belief and ideas built into it that native speakers don't always hear. So like, if you say to somebody in English, "for better or for worse," you're not thinking, Here I am quoting the Anglican marriage ceremony!
Right.
Right? It's just part of the language. You don't even hear it. And what I discovered in Hebrew and Yiddish, and there are many other Jewish languages, but those are the ones I was studying... those kinds of references, "for better or for worse," "go the extra mile," you know, things we say in English that are literally from the Christian gospels, those kinds of references were from the Torah and from the siddur, from the prayer book, right? From the Talmud, from this vast edifice of Jewish text. And I just thought, like, Look what we're missing as American Jews, writing and reading only in English. Look what we're missing. And I just thought, I want to write in English as though English were a Jewish language. Not, I'm going to write a book with a lot of words in italics, words that maybe you need a footnote or something, like not like that. But to write books where the structure of the story itself was drawn from this vast Jewish tradition, but in a way that any reader of any background could access. And that was the challenge I set for myself as a young writer. What was interesting to me about the project of One Little Goat was, obviously, I'm thinking about it as a book for Jewish readers, but everything is explained in the story, like there's nothing you need to know going into this book. That's what reading enables us to do. It's a portal to a world that you might not live in. That's the purpose of literature. Literature is communication.
Right. So you are definitely an outside the box thinker who is not afraid to speak truth to power, and you seem to see clearly where the rest of us are distracted. And I want to talk about a few examples. First of all, you wrote an article in The Atlantic about why Holocaust education may be making antisemitism worse. So I wanted to ask you about that article, and also what you would recommend instead of Holocaust education.
Yes, that was a piece I published before October 7, that came out in early 2023 and I was working on it for most of the previous year. This article made a lot of people hate me, or, as we say, in publishing, "it started a conversation." I traveled around the country, I went to Holocaust museums, meeting people who create the museums, meeting the people who create curricula for schools, meeting with teachers, meeting with legislators who pass mandates for Holocaust education and meeting with students. I mean, I interviewed hundreds of people. What was really striking to me was realizing that there's like 20-something states in this country that require Holocaust education in school. I want to be clear, it should be 50. I'm not making an argument that we shouldn't have Holocaust education. But what I thought was really interesting is there's not a single state in this country where anyone is required to learn: who are Jews. Who are Jews? What does it mean to be Jewish? What is Jewish civilization? It's completely erased from education and our culture, to such an extent that I was at the Dallas Holocaust Museum, talking to docents at the museum and asking them, well, when the students come through this museum, what do they typically ask? And these docents said, You know what they ask? They ask, Are there still Jews alive today? Because if you went to this museum, you wouldn't know.
Holocaust education, like there are no Jews after 1945, number one. Number two, the Jews you meet have no power. The heroes are righteous Gentiles who've saved the Jews. And yes, that's an important story to tell, but to me, what is really striking about this, is that this is a total focus on Jews who have no power, no agency, and that is what's celebrated. That is not a message that I want to give to my children about what it means to be Jewish. A Judaism that is first of all, totally devoid of content. Right? What makes you Jewish is that you got killed by Nazis, in Europe, almost a hundred years ago. We just erased 3000 years of Jewish civilization, which, by the way, was the Nazi project. The Nazi project was not just about murdering 6 million people, it was about erasing Jewish civilization. Why are we participating in that erasure? If we were going to teach kids in public school, one thing about Jews, why is it that Jews were murdered in Europe between 1933 and 1945? Jewish civilization is foundational to the history of the West, and it's also a counterculture that weaves its way through world history.
To me, this is an incredibly inspiring story, and it's also not possible to combat anti semitism without understanding the story. The foundational aspect of Jewish civilization is its role as the first monotheism, belief in one God and its rejection of idolatry. Right now, when I say those words, that sounds like I'm talking about religion. This is not a religious idea. This is a political idea. In the ancient Near East, there were many different societies that had many, many gods. In almost every case, one of those gods is the dictator. In ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh is considered one of the gods. And so in the ancient Near East, when the Jews say that they don't bow to idols, what that actually means is that they do not bow to tyrants.
Wow.
And this is the reason that you still have Jewish civilization today, when all these other civilizations of the ancient Near East no longer exist. There are a couple that exist; very, very few. There's all these empires that come and conquer the ancient land of Israel. These empires conquered everybody, I mean, like the experience of what happened to the Jews under all of these empires, whether it was enslavement, whether it was genocide, whether it was exile, whether it was ethnic cleansing, displacement, all of those things, those are normal in world history. Unfortunately. I mean, there's basically almost no group in world history that hasn't experienced one of these things. Humans do horrible things to each other.
What is not unique, but *unusual* is that the Jews culturally survived those experiences, and did so by reinventing themselves. What is consistent through that whole history is the refusal to bow to tyrants. This has always been an anti hierarchical tradition. It is an anti tyrannical tradition. One anti semitic stereotype from the ancient world that you probably have never heard of today, because it died, is that Jews are lazy, because in ancient times, people like Greeks and Romans who came to ancient Judea, would see poor people not working, and they were baffled by this, because in the ancient world, only wealthy people had leisure, but Jews had already invented the weekend. Today we think of Shabbat, of the Sabbath as, like this ritual thing, right? It's actually a social justice initiative, because this was an absolutely radical idea in the ancient world, that people should have the freedom to do what they want with their most precious commodity, which is their time. I mean, this was unheard of in the ancient world, that anyone would have leisure, other than the rich.
The Torah is full of these radical ideas, and the biggest one is this idea of freedom, the liberation story from Egypt. I don't even care if it's true or not historically. The idea that this is your foundational legend of how your people came to be... I mean, most foundational legends are about a restoring of a social hierarchy. So if you think about something like Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus returning to his kingdom to take back his rightful throne. The story the Exodus is about burning the palace down! I mean, it's about Pharaoh and his chariots drown in the sea, and these runaway slaves are the victors! I mean, that is a radical, you know, this is a truly revolutionary concept. This is an anti tyrannical concept. It's astonishing in the ancient world, it's astonishing today! We're still fighting tyranny today, Jews are still fighting tyranny today. So the root of anti semitism: in every generation, there are these tyrannical ideas where some society believes that whatever they believe has to be universal, and then when Jews say "no thanks" to that idea, that's a problem. Because Jews don't conform. The Passover story is about that refusal to conform, the refusal to bow to tyrants. And to me, it's just astounding that we're still living with this today. And this is the story that I think people should be learning, to the extent that there's a context for Holocaust education, that is the context for Holocaust education, is the Jewish opposition to tyranny.
See, this is, this is why I love your work so much. You say things and then once you've said them, I'm like, of course, that sounds so obvious, but you're the first person who who put it into words.
I mean, to be fair, it's in the Torah, so I didn't, it wasn't my idea.
But nobody else is talking about it. So thank you. So I want to talk about another example of your outside the box thinking. On the anniversary of the October 7 massacre, you wrote an article explaining that October 7 created a permission structure for anti semitism. So what do you mean by that?
So anti semitism is not just a social prejudice. Ultimately, the through line of anti semitism for thousands of years is denial. It's the denial and appropriation of Jewish experience. And every form of anti semitism is basically a lie. There's lots of these lies, right? Everything from Holocaust denial to the blood libel in the Middle Ages to currently popular lies that you know, Zionism is settler colonialism, or Jews are not indigenous to the land of Israel. All of those lies are all part of what I think of as the foundational Big Lie, that anti semitism is this righteous fight against evil because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist. That is the baseline, and that comes from this idea I mentioned earlier about tyranny, right? It's this tyrannical idea that whatever the universal thing is that Jews are refusing to believe, to bow down to, that shows that they're evil, that places them outside of the circle of humanity.
You see this in ancient times. The Hanukkah story is about this empire that's basically insisting that our Hellenistic, our Greek culture is superior to everyone else's culture. And why the hell wouldn't you bow to Zeus? Right? Like all sophisticated, right-thinking people are bowing to Zeus and playing these naked games and sacrificing to this pantheon Marvel Cinematic Universe of sexy deities, and you Jews are like these losers in the school cafeteria with, like, your bossy, unsexy, invisible God. Right? Like, that's so sad and pathetic. And why would you not want to be part of our cool team? In the Hellenistic regime that conquers Judea in the Hanukkah story, they outlaw circumcision, they outlaw Torah study, they outlaw Sabbath observance, basically saying, All of these are barbaric practices. We are these enlightened Greeks, and we know better. That's the beginning of the Hanukkah revolt. In every generation, there's this permission structure for anti semitism, which is, "here's why it is righteous to oppose the Jews."You have this with Christianity, right? The Jews killed Jesus. (Side note, Jews did not kill Jesus.) Oh, the Jews have rejected the church's universal salvation. You have in the 19th century, this shifted permission structure after the Enlightenment. It's like, of course, you know, enlightened Europeans would never go around basing all their beliefs on Christianity. But now we have this new thing that's universal, which is science, you know, and it's racial science, and Jews have been proven by science to be an inferior race. Then that's the permission structure.
Each of these cases, these ultimately tyrannical societies take on Jewish identity as though it's theirs. The church was like, We're the new Israel. What's the old Israel still doing here? Like, we're the new Israel. In The Hanukkah story, they conquered the temple and they put a statue of Zeus inside the temple. It's like, this is our space. Now we've been blessed. And you have that with Nazism. They actually were claiming that the Jews were persecuting the Germans. It's like an appropriation of the Jews' experience of discrimination. The Soviets do this where they talk about how during World War II, Soviet citizens were slaughtered by the Nazis at Babi Yar, in places like that, the memorials that the Soviets put up do not mention Jews. "Soviets" were murdered by the Nazis. It's this appropriation of the Jewish experience, that this really happened to everyone. Ultimately, the Soviets have this brilliant idea, and this starts in 1918 before the State of Israel, where they come up with this, Of course, we would never be barbaric enough to be anti semitic, old fashioned, racist stuff. We're not anti semitic. We're just ... anti Zionist. That line comes from the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union in 1918.
Wow.
Thirty years before the creation of the State of Israel. It's probably not about Netanyahu! [HEIDI LAUGHS] Of course, like, you know, in the process of only being anti Zionist and not being anti semitic, they managed to persecute and imprison and torture and murder tens of thousands of Jews. Then they export these slogans to their client states in the developing world and in the Arab world, where they have to explain away their loss in the Six Day War. And then they create this worldwide propaganda machine that starts putting out all the slogans we still hear today. You know, "Zionism is racism. Zionism is colonialism. Zionism is genocide. Zionism is imperialism" Right? "Zionism is apartheid." All of those lines are from the KGB. It's fed to progressive groups in the United States, tens of thousands of books and articles that they're pumping this out, like, daily for 30 years. I mean, they even got it into the UN "Zionism is racism" in the 1970s.
Then we have the fall of the Soviet Union. It's the rise of Iran. Right after the Iranian revolution in 1979 they inherited all of this rhetoric. They now create a new permission structure. "We are champions of human rights." You see this in the year 2001. Iran's getting a lot of heat at the UN and they're facing an opposition movement at home. There's starting to be clamoring about their human rights abuses at home and in their proxies that they've already created, you know, like they've already created Hezbollah, they've already funded Hamas, and they're starting to get heat for this. And what they do is, they seize the language of human rights. There's this UN International Conference on racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance. They take control of the Asian conference. They bar Israeli and Jewish delegates from attending the conference. In that conference in Tehran, they write the entire Declaration of Human Rights that's going to be the basis for the World Conference that then happens in Durban, South Africa in August of 2001 and they create this 70 page document about how it's so important to fight for human rights, and the entire document is about Israel as a violator of human rights. It is absolutely brilliant, because suddenly, no one's paying attention to them as a violator of human rights. No one's paying attention to all of the proxy groups they've built around the Middle East. I mean, we now see in Syria what they did, I mean, you know, hundreds of thousands of people in mass graves. It became super awkward two weeks after that conference, when they've declared that Israel is the world's greatest terrorist, it leaves people bereft of a language to talk about, you know, when actual terrorists murder 3000 Americans in New York City. It's like, you know, how do we even talk about this in the UN? Because we've already declared that, you know, there's one violator of human rights and one terrorist state in the entire world, and it's Israel.
So that's a permission structure. And then we see that today. I mean, it's like, "oh, I don't hate Jews, I just hate Zionists." Who are 90% of the world's Jews, 85% of American Jews under 40, and obviously half the world's Jews lives in Israel. So it's a meaningless thing to say. But it had a long life in the Soviet Union. That was a long answer to a really short question.
No! Thank you, I mean, it had to be a long answer. There's a lot going on there.
Sure is, yeah, unfortunately. People give themselves a way to feel righteous, because, you know, anti semitism is not about somebody cackling in their basement being like, "hahaha, my evil plan." No, it's always about someone who feels they're fighting for truth and justice by fighting the Jews, because so many Western societies, they're structured around their opposition to whatever they call Judaism, because Judaism is an anti tyrannical movement.
So your book, People Love Dead Jews, and your companion podcast, Adventures with Dead Jews, are both brilliant and amazing. For those who don't already know about it, talk a little bit about what you mean when you say that people love dead Jews.
The premise of the book is twofold. It's basically that people tell stories about dead Jews that make them feel better about themselves, and that living Jews have to erase themselves in order to gain public respect. The quickest illustration of this phenomenon is a story I tell at the beginning of the book. It's about an incident that happened at the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam in 2018 and it was about a young Jewish man who was working at that museum, and the museum would not allow him to wear his yarmulke to work. They made him hide it under a baseball hat. And he appealed this decision to the board of the museum. The board of the museum then deliberated for six months, and finally relented and let him wear his yarmulke to work. And as I put it in the book, six months is a really long time for the Anne Frank Museum to ponder whether or not it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.
I had read about this story in some news item. A few months later, I was thinking about this, and I was like, did I dream this? Did this really happen? And then I was looking it up again, and like, not only did I not dream it, but something equally stupid had happened the year before, in 2017 with the museum's audio guide display. It's an international museum. They have probably 10 or 15 languages for their audio guide, and it has the languages listed. And it says English, and there's a British flag, Francais, there's a French flag, Espanol: Spanish flag, Hebrew... no flag. And the museum has since corrected this. But I remember reading about this and being like, you know, these are PR mishaps... they're not mistakes. People at the museum said, You know, well, we don't want to do anything that would interfere with the visitors experiences of the Jews' humanity. I mean, the humanity of the nice Jews, right? The dead ones. Not the ones doing gross things like practicing Judaism or living in Israel, where half the world's Jews live.
We can talk all we want about the humanity, but what I basically realized is that "people love dead Jews" means that Jews are only acceptable in most non Jewish societies if they're powerless, whether that means politically impotent or dead. And I explore this concept in the book in lots of different settings. So some of it is about Holocaust memorialization, but a lot of it is in a lot of other settings around the world. I mean, I have this chapter that's in China. I mean, it's about the way Jewish heritage sites are treated. It's about the way news stories about attacks on Jews are treated. And you know, of course, this book came out in 2021 so it was, there's a lot of things to update now. So I am working on another non fiction book that's going to sort of bring it to the present.
When I Google you, I get a lot of articles and interviews about People Love Dead Jews, and it seems like it's kind of overshadowing your novels, although they are also amazing. I remember hearing an interview where you said People Love Dead Jews ate your life. So do you want to take this opportunity to call attention to any of your earlier books or your other writing?
I mean, my novels are way better than People Love Dead Jews. They're like, you know, a lot more fun to read. Um, sure, so I have five novels, all of them deal with contemporary Jewish life, historical Jewish life. I'm just going to highlight one, the book that I published right before People Love Dead Jews is a book called Eternal Life. This is about a Jewish woman who can't die. She's been alive for 2000 years. She's in this situation because of a vow that she made in the ancient temple in Jerusalem. After the temple was destroyed, she's unable to get out of this vow. She has to keep living all these lives. She's been married 45 times. She's had hundreds and hundreds of children and outlived them all, which makes family life a whole lot less fun. There's also one other person in the world who's in the same situation as her. I don't know if you've ever had that experience of having a former romantic partner who never leaves you alone, is always trying to get back together with you, like always hopes, you know, maybe there'll be one more chance. Now, imagine if that person really never left you alone and was kind of following you around and stalking you for 2000 years. Kind of the situation that the main character is in. It ends up being kind of a meditation on parenthood and romantic relationships, but it's really kind of this metaphor for Jewish history, because it's sort of like, you know, like, Oh my god, are we still dealing with this? Why are we still dealing with this? How are we still dealing with this, and where do we find meaning in it? Yeah, it's a lot more fun than People Love Dead... it's actually the opposite of People Love Dead Jews, because it's about a Jewish woman who can't die.
Right! Thank you.
I would love to hear about your inspiration for your short story, Shtetl World, which was about a shtetl theme park, published in Commentary magazine back in 2010 Can you talk about that?
That's a deep cut, I'm very impressed. You know, I write novels and essays, you know, and now a graphic novel, but that, I think, is the only short story I ever wrote. In the process of studying Yiddish literature, I kept encountering this kind of, like, kitschy interpretations of Yiddish. Like every time I would mention I'm studying Yiddish literature, some people would be like, Oh, Yiddish is so funny. And I'm like, Actually, it's not any funnier than any other language. Languages aren't funny. The people who use them are using them for different purposes, number one, and number two, the feature that I found most noticeable about Yiddish literature wasn't its humor, it was its earnestness. There's this real brutal, brutal candor in Yiddish literature that you don't see in English literature. And I realized this romanticization of the shtetl, this like Fiddler on the Roof kind of thing, is doing emotional work for people, because it's much easier for people after the Holocaust to think about the Yiddish speaking world that was destroyed as like a bunch of sort of sad sack losers who were like, too dumb to know what was coming or something. And they're not like us, like we're all sophisticated here in America. It's much more brutal if you think about those people as not only your intellectual equals, but your intellectual superiors, which is what they were and what that culture was.
So the story Shtetl World is sort of a satire that kitschification of the Jewish past, and it's about a shtetl theme park, kind of like Colonial Williamsburg, where there's costumed interpreters and there's shows. Every day at two o'clock, there's a wedding, every day at 4:30 there's a pogrom. There are rides. I kind of had fun with it. And it's a story from the point of view of two of these underemployed graduate students who work at the Shtetl World and are dealing with all this kitsch. It's a very sarcastic story, it was written at a moment in my life when I was just very frustrated with the way I felt like people didn't even bother to understand what they were trying to romanticize.
I hear that you are the creative advisor for the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish history in Philadelphia. How do visitors to the museum feel your impact?
Well, they don't yet, because the museum is in the process of a redesign. And so that's the project that I've been working on with them, is recentering the stories that it's telling. And I want to be clear, it's not just me, like there's many people involved in this effort. It's very common for museums to undergo redesign, like every 10, 15, 20 years, and the museum right now is from around 2010 so it is due for a redesign. They actually have recently got the act of Congress that puts them on the path to becoming a Smithsonian Institution.
Yes, I heard about that!
I've been advising them on how to reframe the story that they're telling about Jewish life in ways that are more inspiring to visitors and the kinds of questions that visitors come with now. Because I think the kind of questions people were coming with 15 years ago are really different from the questions that people are asking now, especially in this time of shockingly rising anti semitism. We live in an America that's much more polarized now. The way we think about minority groups in America right now is really different from the way we thought about them 15 years ago. Also, I think the museum has a huge role to play in not just teaching people about the American Jewish story, but in educating the broader American public about Jewish civilization. That wasn't seen as the most important need when the museum was designed, but it's becoming clear that's a really important part of the museum's mission. The museum has a great opportunity right now to change the way we think about a lot of these questions around not just Jewish life and identity, but even living in a pluralistic society.
Is there an interview question you never get asked that you would like to answer?
Well, one for this book in particular is, what does your seder look like? The answer is, unlike any seder that you probably have ever been to in your life, because our seder is filled with special effects. For example, one of the things we do is we build a walk-through Passover experience in our basement and garage.
Wow!
It's actually a very small one-room basement, but we've divided it with hanging black paper, which is all painted with neon paint, and we have black lights. I have four children and so the kids are actors in different spaces, acting out the experience. And we change it every year a little bit. There's like, one space that's an Egyptian tomb, and then there's another space that's an Israelite home, where they're like, slaughtering a lamb, you know? And then you go to the next room, and that's the Pharaoh's palace, where the Pharaoh and his firstborn son are, like, talking about how the son is such a bum or whatever. And then the Angel of Death comes out of the closet and slaughters him. And you move from that, then you go to the garage. We set up a laser swamp. Do you know what a laser swamp is?
No. What's that?
They do this sometimes, like at rock concerts. In our case, we put blue lasers at waist height around our garage, and then we have fog machines. It looks like the surface of water.
Wow!
And then you walk through it and it parts in front of you.
WOW! How did you how did you, how did you find out that that was a thing?
My husband is a guy who, like, solders wires, this is the kind of thing he does for fun. That's just like, the walk-through part of the show. There's other parts. My husband made all the animals of Chad Gadya out of LED lights that he soldered into the shapes. You turn on each animal as you go through Chad Gadya. We also have plague drops where, like, you have 150 ping pong balls that fall off of the ceiling fan. We smash the idols every year. The idols are made out of something different. Sometimes they're Play- Doh. Now we have a 3D printer, so we print with really thin plastic, actual Egyptian idols, and people, like, crush them and smash them.
Every year we produce a movie. It's the Passover story. My children and my siblings' children, it's 14 children. It's different every year. One of the ones that we did was like the plague of wild beasts. And they did this parody of the movie Cocaine Bear, Chametz Bear. The bear is like ripping into this bag of flour, and then goes on a rampage and chases one of my other kids, who's in the Pharaoh suit. There's one where the Angel of Death is lounging on the couch playing Wordle on his phone. He gets texts from God. And it's like, Hey, you know, Here's tonight's kill list, you know? And it's like, Merneptah and Amenhotep and Larry. And then it's like, Can you do me a favor? Kill all the firstborns, not the Jews, though? And then the Angel of Death looks at the camera like, I hate my job. And then the next scene is the Angel of Death knocking on the door of our house. One of my other kids answers the door in Egyptian get up, and he's like, We don't want your Girl Scout cookies. The Angel of Death, he's like, we've been trying to reach you about your chariot's extended warranty. It's expired.
[LAUGHING] This is great stuff.
Like, literally, every year, it's something different.
Yeah, that's great. Do you actually sit down at a table and read the Haggadah?
Every page of the Haggadah, but every page has special effects.
That's incredible.
There'll be a PowerPoint going on a projector. You know, we get to the part where we're washing hands, and it's like, we're washing hands, but then there's like, a sign that says, you know, Slaves must wash hands before returning to work. [HEIDI LAUGHS] Yeah, every page of the Haggadah there's like some other thing.
It's like the families who start preparing for the next Halloween on November 1. Are you working on this all year long?
Well, I have a rule for myself, which is, we do not start until the day after Purim. Otherwise it would absolutely drive me insane.
Do you treat any other holidays like this?
No, no, no, this is the one that we go crazy for. I've been obsessed with Pesach for a very long time.
That's great. I love that. So what are you working on next?
I am working on another non fiction book that's kind of taking off where People Love Dead Jews left off. It's really much more addressed toward, how do we try to solve this problem? I like the obnoxious titles, and it's literally called The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
Oh my God... [LAUGHING]
The subtitle is A Love Story for the Living. It is kind of leading toward this idea that I mentioned, understanding Judaism as a fight against tyranny.
It's Tikkun Olam Time. What action would you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?
Well, I've been talking a lot in this conversation about the absence of a deeper education and understanding about, I keep saying "who Jews are," but what I really mean by that is Jewish civilization and the role that it plays in American life, the role that it plays in world history and world civilization. I think you see that in the total absence of Jews from K-12 public school curriculum. As of like, ten minutes ago, I'm the founder of a new nonprofit which is called The Mosaic Persuasion. This is an initiative that I've started, to basically educate the broader American public about who Jews are, and part of that is rethinking the way we talk about Jewish culture and civilization in K to 12 schools. So I would encourage your listeners, anyone who's in education, in museum work and online education efforts, I hope they'll contact me. Hopefully we will be up and running at MosaicPersuasion.org but if we're not yet, you can also find me on my website, DaraHorn.com. You can contact me through there if you'd like to be involved in some way in this effort, because we are starting to look for people to work on things like curriculum.
I see this really, as building a movement. This project can help transform school systems and other ways that young people learn. I think there's been a tradition in the Jewish community in confronting anti semitism of, unfortunately, kind of hoping it goes away, or trying to make the argument to combat anti semitism that, Oh, Jews are just like everyone else, and that's why you shouldn't hate Jews. And the reality is that Jews spent 3000 years not being like everyone else, and that's where it gets interesting. And so my tikkun olam moment for listeners is first of all to get excited about educating themselves and others about this civilization. There's many ways to do that. Jewish kidlit is a huge piece of that. That was like one of my goals in venturing into children's books. But also being that person in your community who can be the resource, educating yourself in a way that can make you that resource. My biggest message is, Jews have always been an anti tyrannical, anti hierarchical movement, where it's all about honoring each other in disagreement. I would urge people to not shy away from those kinds of conversations, that they might want to hunker down, and I would encourage people to meet them head on.
I feel like you are the shofar blower, like you keep calling us to pay attention to things that we haven't noticed. So is there a particular message that you have right now for fellow Jews or for others?
I think that we have found ourselves in the American Jewish community, and certainly in the past year, thrown into this frightening situation, feeling like we constantly have to defend who we are. And I've noticed that the impulse is toward, you know, 'I don't want to ever offend or alienate anyone, and that's my priority,'rather than 'I want to be honest about who I am.' The experience of the Jewish people for thousands of years has been one of bravery and courage, and I think that this is a moment for everyone in the Jewish community, but really everybody who cares about freedom and living in a pluralistic society, to be brave, to be bold and to not be afraid to be uncomfortable and to approach conversations, not with fear but with courage. There are, unfortunately, a lot of people in the world who want us to shut up. I'm personally not very good at that! But I think that this is a moment where, especially talking about children's literature, we need to raise our children to be brave and courageous and to know who they are.
That's beautiful. Thank you very much. Dara Horn, thank you so so much for speaking with me, and also for your amazing insights into the way the world works. You have important ideas to share, and I want to thank you for speaking up. And also, happy Passover.
Thank you. Thank you. Happy Passover to you.
[MUSIC, ANNOUNCEMENT] Before we hear the dedication from upcoming guest, Miri Leshem-Pelly, I want to draw your attention to another podcast, The Children's Book Podcast hosted by Matthew Winner, on which I was a recent guest. I was honored to join Matthew to talk about the 20 year history of The Book of Life, plus, we geeked out together about Dara Horn and One Little Goat. I also want to plug Holiday Highlights, which is a seasonal list of all the best new kids' books about Jewish holidays, picked by experts at the Association of Jewish Libraries. The spring 2025 list of Shabbat, Purim, and Passover books, of course, includes OneLittle Goat: A Passover Catastrophe! Check the show notes for links to The Children's Book Podcast and to Holiday Highlights. And now, a few words from our next guest.
[MUSIC, DEDICATION] Hi. This is Miri Leshem-Pelly, author and illustrator of AFeather, a Pebble, a Shell. I'll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast, and I'd like to dedicate this episode to my parents, whose love of nature has always inspired me.
[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473, or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com. Subscribe to my newsletter on Substack to join me in growing Jewish joy and shrinking antisemitic hate. Get show notes, transcripts, Jewish kidlit news, and occasional calls to action right in your inbox. Sign up for the newsletter at BookOfLifePodcast.substack.com. You can also find The Book of Life on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. You can also help us out by becoming a monthly supporter through Patreon or making a one time donation to our home library, the Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel of Boca Raton, Florida. You'll find links for all of that and more at BookOfLifePodcast.com. Additional support comes from the Association of Jewish Libraries, the leading authority on Judaic librarianship, which also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. Learn more about AJL at JewishLibraries.org. Our background music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading. [END MUSIC]
